


However Bright the Night

by Sholio



Category: Forever Knight
Genre: Gen, Halloween, Trick or Treating, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-26
Updated: 2017-10-26
Packaged: 2019-01-23 11:46:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12506684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Nick and Nat get roped into helping Schanke take Jenny and her friends trick-or-treating. But not all the monsters who walk the streets of nighttime Toronto are fake ones.





	However Bright the Night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [greerwatson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greerwatson/gifts).



In the residential streets of west-end Toronto, night was almost as light as day with the glow of decorations that would have sent half the vampires in the Raven into a scornful laughing fit. Grinning pumpkins, hanging strings of orange and yellow lights, cackling plastic witches with light bulbs in their cauldrons ... and every porch light on the street was lit. Laughing groups of children in cheap or homemade costumes ran from door to door, most of them very small, though some were teens indulging in the last vestiges of childhood. And then there were the parents and chaperones, most of them dressed up too.

Nick couldn't help thinking of harvest festivals in years long gone by. Dancing village girls spinning in the light of autumn bonfires, straw men set aflame, lanterns dancing in the dusk and torches brightening the night ...

"Earth to Nick," Natalie murmured, and he glanced at her. There was a knowing glimmer to her smile; she knew he'd drifted into thoughts of times long gone and people who were only bones now.

Some deservedly so, some undeservedly. And every one of these laughing children would be bones someday too ... but if there was one thing he'd learned through this many centuries of (un)life, it was that sometimes, you simply had to seize the moment and not worry about yesterday or tomorrow.

Sometimes, he was even good at it.

Jenny Schanke and her little cohort of friends scampered down from the porch of their latest target, waving their Halloween baskets. "This house gave us Butterfingers, Dad! Whole bars!" Jenny crowed.

"Good job, punkin."

"Dad," Jenny said, glaring up at her father over the curve of her pumpkin costume, "that's not any funnier than the first twenty times."

"Excuse you, kiddo. It's a classic."

There was still an air of unreality about the whole thing. Nick couldn't quite believe he was doing this.

("Nick, _please."_

"I think you can take your daughter trick-or-treating without my help, Schank. Even without Myra."

"You're leaving me at the mercy of a dozen sugar-addled seven-year-olds, Nick. That's not the act of a partner or a friend."

"He's got a point, Nick," said Natalie, the traitor.

Nick flashed her a brief smile. "If I'm going down, you're going down too.")

Natalie had shown up in a white pantsuit with her hair coiled and pinned into very fluffy Princess Leia cinnabuns, and a toy lightsaber stuck through her belt. Schanke had pasted on a fake mustache and put on a Hawaiian shirt and a plastic toy gun.

("Is it really appropriate to go trick-or-treating with seven-year-olds as a 1970s pimp, Schank?"

"I'm Magnum P.I., you philistine." Schanke looked Nick up and down. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you weren't wearing a costume."

"I'm a vampire. They look just like everyone else."

"He's an undercover detective," Nat said promptly. "Obviously. What does he look like to you, Schanke?"

"He looks like someone who didn't bother putting on a Halloween costume."

"Princess Leia doesn't have a lightsaber," one of the kids in Jenny's group put in, staring critically at Nat's getup.

"She's a princess, she can have whatever she wants," Nat shot back, which made Jenny cross her arms over her pumpkin and give the boy a triumphant look.)

So here they were, traipsing through Toronto's residential neighborhoods. And Nick was, against all his expectations ... having fun.

At least until he noticed the furtive shadow ghosting between two groups of trick-or-treaters.

It was a teen or young adult, a kid dressed in black with a mop of unruly brown hair. Not anyone who would have drawn the eye, except Nick couldn't help noticing the way the kid moved, the inhuman grace and the way people didn't quite look at him.

"Back in a minute," he murmured, squeezing Nat's hand, and crossed the street.

The kid had paused at the bottom of a path leading up to a particularly well-decorated house, the lawn awash in plastic pumpkins and skeletons. A group of teens were at the door right now, giggling along with the young couple who apparently owned the house. In a few minutes, Jenny's group would come along.

"You," Nick said softly.

The kid whipped around with preternatural speed. His speed was no match for Nick's; Nick caught his arm before he could raise it, and moved in on him, until mere inches separated their faces.

"Go away," Nick hissed. "Go away now. No hunting here. If I see you in this neighborhood again, I'll find your lair and light it up with fire. Don't think I won't."

He let his fangs show, let the monster inside him flare for just that one moment.

The kid -- and he _was_ just a kid, young in the vampire as well as the human sense, probably a fledgling of one of Janette's regulars -- flinched away from the ring of command in Nick's voice. An older vampire would have laughed it off, the imperative tone and the threat as well. This one withdrew into the shadows, vanishing as swiftly as he'd come.

"Nick?" Nat asked quietly, coming up behind him. "Is everything okay?"

"It's all right," he murmured, as Jenny's group ran, laughing, up the path, veering around the other kids coming down. "Everything's fine. Just Halloween."

Because of course this was a night when the true darkness walked the streets along with the fake, emboldened by the holiday's once-a-year air of legitimacy.

He supposed he was no exception to that.

But if monsters would be abroad this night, Nick planned to make sure that they knew that one monster had staked out this corner of Toronto as his own, and any who chose to hunt here would find themselves in a fight.

This place was his, these people were his, and those who threatened them did so at their own risk.


End file.
